Paramount’s $110 billion merger with Warner Bros. won approval from the Department of Justice as well as regulators in dozens of countries, including the European Commission and the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority. Writing in the National Review, Ethan Tran notes that those reviews asked the question that merger law always asks: Would the deal harm competition and consumers? The resounding answer was “No.”
The only major public challenge to the deal came from 12 state attorneys general led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta. Their settlement, which a federal judge approved on Wednesday, partly addresses competition questions. But it reaches far beyond antitrust to enact industrial policy: dictating where Paramount must film its movies, earmarking penalty money for union benefit funds, and creating a board to guard “editorial independence” at CNN and CBS News that raises its own First Amendment concerns. More troubling than any effects on competition is what the decree does to antitrust itself: It uses competition law to enact industrial policy goals that have little to do with competition.
Read the rest in the National Review.
